Kenneth Franklin, Astronomer, Dies at 84 (original) (raw)
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- June 21, 2007
Kenneth L. Franklin, long the Hayden Planetarium’s top astronomer, whose accomplishments included helping pinpoint the first noise known to have come from another planet and inventing a watch for use on the moon, died in Boulder, Colo., on Monday when the sun rose in New York at 5:07 a.m. He was 84, and had for years provided astronomical information to this newspaper, including the hour of sunrise.
The cause was complications of heart surgery, his daughter Julie Jones said.
Dr. Franklin, who lived in Loveland, Colo., worked for a generation at the Hayden Planetarium, part of the American Museum of Natural History, where his responsibilities included being chief scientist and chairman of the planetarium. He was a popular lecturer, the producer of his own radio program and an educator who encouraged students to analyze the radio waves emanating from Jupiter that he had discovered.
He wrote and presented the planetarium shows that became a New York institution, including an annual look at the sky over Bethlehem when Jesus was born. His many other regular projects included doing astronomical calculations for The Farmer’s Almanac. And he chased comets in ships and planes.
A diminutive man for whom the adjective cherubic might have been invented, he was usually gleefully optimistic. When astrologers in India foretold the end of the world in 1962, he observed that the same alignment of stars had occurred twice in April 1821, but that doomsday was somehow forestalled.
Then he could not resist a trademark bon mot: “The word ‘dis-aster,’ in fact, means ‘bad star,’ ” he said.
Indeed, in all matters celestial, Dr. Franklin was usually asked to comment, and he usually had a response. Don’t worry about an asteroid hurtling toward Earth, he would say soothingly. That Soviet satellite people reported seeing was most likely a meteor shower. Were there ever lakes on the moon? He interpreted a picture as suggesting there were.
Whenever possible, he did not skimp on detail. When in 1984, The New York Times asked him to explain how he came up with the times of sunrise and sunset, he expounded about spherical trigonometry, beginning with the correct declination of the sun — meaning its position north or south of the equator — which changes moment by moment. He ended by explaining why leap years are needed to correct inevitable miscalculations.
Kenneth Linn Franklin was born in Alameda, Calif., on March 25, 1923. One of his earliest memories was looking up at the moon and asking what it was. His mother was blind and could not tell him.
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Kenneth L. Franklin in 1957, early in his time at the planetarium.Credit...Arthur Brower/The New York Times
Dr. Franklin earned a doctorate in astronomy from the University of California, Berkeley, and joined the department of terrestrial magnetism of the Carnegie Institution in Washington. In scanning the heavens for radio noise in 1955, he and Dr. Bernard F. Burke, also of Carnegie, began hearing a sort of hissing sound they at first thought came from the spark plugs of a passing vehicle.
They identified the source of the radio emissions as the planet Jupiter. It was the first noise ever identified as coming from a specific planet. They presented their findings on April 6, 1955, at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
In 1956, Dr. Franklin accepted an astronomer’s position at the Hayden Planetarium, where he came to enjoy the challenge of mounting big shows. In 1958, he produced one on “The Expanding Universe,” for which he chose music by Bizet, Brahms, Ravel, Schubert and Stravinsky.
“The earth is out of focus,” he said worriedly, as a reporter chronicled the final stages of preparation.
His specialty became putting things into focus, not least for journalists on deadline. When all 14 major bodies revolving around the sun were visible within an hour one night in 1959, he explained the rarity of the phenomenon.
“You would have to compute the periods of revolution for all the bodies of the solar system taken simultaneously,” he said.
In 1970, he invented a watch for moon walkers that measures time in what he called “lunations,” the period it takes the moon to rotate and revolve around the earth; each lunation is exactly 29.530589 earth days. The watch has not yet become a big seller.
Dr. Franklin is survived by his wife, Charlotte; his daughters, Kathleen Williams of Cleveland; Christine Redding of Olympia, Wash.; and Julie Jones of Estes Park, Colo.; six grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.
When people celebrated, cowered or yawned at the dawn of a new millennium on Jan. 1, 2000, Dr. Franklin wrote a paper strongly explaining that the new millennium would not properly begin until a year later.
He ended with a point that seems indisputable: “Whenever you note the time on the clock, realize that it is now — right now — later than it has ever been.”
A correction was made on
June 25, 2007
:
An obituary on Thursday of Kenneth Franklin, long the top astronomer of the Hayden Planetarium, misstated the definition of a lunation, the unit of time used by a watch he invented for use on the Moon. It is the period it takes the Moon to rotate and revolve around the Earth, not around the Sun.
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